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AMES, Iowa -- Joe Biden is in the 27th minute of his five-minute presentation, but nobody in the church basement has slipped away, nobody is nodding off, nobody is doing anything but following his every word.

"It was a mistake," he says in reply to a question about his vote to authorize the Iraq war. "I regret my vote."

Joe Biden's mouth can get him in trouble, but when it is working right, the words drop from his lips like pearls, and nodding heads now spread through the audience like ripples on a pond.

Biden's full reply to the attendees of the Story County Annual Soup Supper takes 4 minutes and 45 seconds -- it can take him 4 minutes and 45 seconds to say "hello" -- but here is the short version:

"It was a mistake," Biden says. "I regret my vote. I regret not realizing how incompetent (the Bush administration) would be. The president did not level with us. And if I had known it, I would never have voted to give him that authority in the first place."

The applause washes over him. It threatens to go on and on until he cuts it off by saying: "I want to do yes-or-no answers from now on."

Everybody laughs.

"But that was an important question," Biden says.

How important? Well, imagine that question being asked at a Democratic debate -- as surely it will be -- with all the Democratic candidates on stage.

Biden will say his vote was a mistake. As will Chris Dodd. As will John Edwards.

Hillary Clinton?

She will say, I guess, what she said in Dover, N.H., the other day: "If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from."

And Joe Biden wants to make sure he is one of the others they choose.

Most politicians love to serve but hate to run, and you can hardly blame them: Running is when you get the least respect. Running is when the voters remind you that you are a job applicant and they are doing the hiring.

But Biden, a senator from Delaware, seems to live for campaigning, live for the give and take, live for switching audiences from rapt attention to raucous laughter and back again.

Joe Biden is a glad-hander in the best sense of the word: He looks glad to be grasping each person's hand, looking the person in the eye, answering some question or exchanging some pleasantry -- "You're going to a wedding in Delaware? What hotel? You're kidding! I live four miles from that hotel!" -- and then, spying the next person down the row, saying, "I'm coming for you! I'm coming!"

At the soup supper, he kneels down on one knee on the tile floor next to an elderly woman and, gripping her hand, says in a loud whisper: "Let the press know I'm not a phony."

Does it really matter? Voters appreciate this much effort even if the candidate is faking sincerity.

The church basement is redolent of soup and succotash. People sit at long tables covered by oilcloths. Power strips have been supplied, not for laptops, but for the 18 crockpots in which the soups and stews bubble and simmer. A mild snowstorm (fewer than 5 inches) has been going on outside, but every seat is filled and some people are standing against the walls.

Retail politics like this has been derided. And while it is true that candidates even in retail states like Iowa and New Hampshire will end up reaching more people by TV than in person, the tradition is a powerful one and best not dismissed.

Real retail events are not grip-and-grins, where the candidate stands in a receiving line, spending only a few seconds with each voter. Real retail demands time, and Biden is spending the time.

He walks up and down between the tables. His long white hair is combed straight back. He is wearing a light blue shirt and dark blue tie, a navy blue blazer and gray slacks that break exquisitely over his tasseled black loafers.

Tasseled black loafers? Well, you can take the boy out of Delaware, but …

Actually, even though Biden is the only man in the room wearing a tie, let alone tasseled loafers, it works. Iowans don't want candidates showing up in work shirts and overalls pretending to be one of them. They just want somebody who understands them.

But why all this effort for Iowa? Why are so many candidates coming so early? Because they all fear the race for the nomination is going to be over very quickly and there will be no time to recover if they stumble and fall.

So they all have the same strategy: Win early, win often.

And it all starts here, in places like this, in church basements in Iowa.

I caught up with Biden by phone Monday and he told me a story -- it took him about 4 minutes and 45 seconds -- about how he was campaigning in Delaware as a young man and he met a guy at a gas station who was wearing a John Deere cap and was slouching on a chair around a potbelly stove.

"Why should I vote for you?" the man asked.

"Because I'm just like you," Biden replied.

The man sat up straight. "Boy, if you ain't different than me," he said, "I ain't voting for you!"

Biden and I both laughed.

"I guess I am a street politician," Biden said. "My whole career, whenever I wanted to get a sense of what people were thinking, the only way I trust it is to go out and listen to people. It sounds corny, but it is true."

I mentioned his tasseled loafers, and we both laughed again.

"Iowa is authentic, and they are looking for authenticity," he said. "I don't wear funny hats. But the major thing about Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, is that they want to look you in the eye and poke you."

Poke you?

"What they want to do," Biden said, "is kick the tires before they buy the car."